Iḍāfah
Sign in to savethumb|Roadsign in Morocco, showing an iḍāfah construction: "Commune of Oulmes". Iḍāfah () is the Arabic grammatical construct case, mostly used to indicate possession.
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Encyclopedic overview
16 sectionsContents
- Terminology
- Kinds of relationship expressed
- Forming ''iḍāfah'' constructions
- First term
- Second term
- Three or more terms
- Indicating definiteness in ''iḍāfah'' constructions
- Nominal sentences, noun-adjective phrases, and ''iḍāfah''
- Adjectives and other modifiers in ''iḍāfah''
- Modifying the first term
- Modifying the last term
- Modifying both terms
- ''Iḍāfah'' constructions using pronouns
- Variant forms
- Pronominal nouns in most of Arabic dialects
- References
thumb|Roadsign in Morocco, showing an iḍāfah construction: "Commune of Oulmes". Iḍāfah () is the Arabic grammatical construct case, mostly used to indicate possession.
Iḍāfah basically entails putting one noun after another: the second noun specifies more precisely the nature of the first noun. In forms of Arabic which mark grammatical case, this second noun must be in the genitive case. The construction is typically equivalent to the English construction "(noun) of (noun)". It is a very widespread way of forming possessive constructions in Arabic, and is typical of a Semitic language. Simple examples include: "the house of peace". "a kilo of bananas". "the daughter of Hasan/Hasan's daughter". '''' "the house of a man/a man's house". "the house of the man/the man's house".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Iḍāfah” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.